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Tarrow asserts that, “People engage in contentious politics when patterns of political opportunities and constraints change and then, by strategically employing a repertoire of collective action, create new opportunities, which are used by others in the widening cycles of contention.”⁶³ The Wiehahn reforms (embracing three Acts passed between 1979 and 1981) offered precisely this bridge of micro-political opportunities to which Tarrow refers. For migrants’ these reforms catapulted them from their earlier profound vulnerability to dismissal and arbitrary behaviour, to a world of comparative dignity and security. The bridge was constructed in two phases. Firstly, state

recognition diminished the fear that many Africans had felt about joining unions. Secondly, formal registration of African unions opened the way for signing recognition agreements, which even when they did not permit plant based bargaining over wages, entrenched protection against victimisation and arbitrary dismissal.

For the unions the new legislation allowed them to reveal themselves. No more recruiting behind bushes outside factories as ‘Baba Kay’ Makama described,⁶⁴ or in secret cells across company departments. Mawu now had the legal right openly to recruit and this legitimacy made it difficult for the state overtly to attack it. A shopsteward at Highveld Steel described how the union grew in his company in the early 1980s: “After Wiehahn it helped us a lot as it decriminalised things. I’d recruit a few and then the rest would play the wait and see game. Then I was lucky, someone was dismissed and these guys waited to see what the union would do. We went for the appeal and won, and the complainant got up and said: `If this company is going to be run by communists I don’t want to be part of it.’ After that the stop order forms were coming in left and right...”⁶⁵ According to Fanaroff, “Once the law changed employers suddenly thought they had to talk to us and that was a complete change. Employers for about a year weren’t quite sure how to deal with us. Some of them went over the other way, they were so accommodating - after refusing to talk to us for years!

It took about two years for them to realise they didn’t have to say much to us then they reverted.”⁶⁶

Mawu immediately took advantage of this new organising space and made the strategic decision to focus on organising workers on the East Rand, the nub of the metal industry. When Moses Mayekiso, a fired worker leader from Toyota, became an organiser in 1979 the union sent him to two plants in Wadeville. Employer uncertainty, following the Wiehahn reforms, meant that Mawu could overtly organise large numbers of workers. It made the strategic decision to move away from the painstaking company by company recruitment of the 1970s and to move to mass organisation.

It recognised the strategic importance of the municipal and company hostels to union work.

Ironically, these hostels were designed as a control mechanism over the African migrant labour force, but the herding together of large numbers of metal workers provided concentrated sites for trade union educators and recruiters. The Vosloosrus hostel on the East Rand, for example, housed 15 000 men. A former inmate, Mandlenkosi Makhoba, a worker at Rely Precision Foundry in Boksburg, recalled how news of the unions spread,

Life in the hostels is like living in a jail. Sometimes there are more than 20 people in one room ... the hostels are a good place to organise... The hostels have been good places to talk and learn about trade unions and the struggles in the factory. Meetings are easy to organise because everybody lives together. We live close to fellow workers of other factories. We share our experiences, and the victories and defeats in one factory become lessons for a large number of people.⁶⁷

The decision in the Transvaal to move to mass recruitment in the hostels was triggered by both the new protection provided by the Wiehahn laws and also by the confluence of emerging inter-union competition in the region. In the early 1980s Saawu and Macwusa, the overtly political Eastern Cape general unions, arrived in the Transvaal. They staged huge, highly politicised, general meetings where workers from different factories were urged to join the union to fight off apartheid and their capitalist oppressors. This method of mass mobilisation was highly effective as thousands of workers joined these unions. Mawu was impressed with how they recruited members and spread the union message. Mawu was also scared of these unions. As Fanaroff recalled, “I was convinced the new unions would come up to the Transvaal and take our members. They organised through community meetings and I argued that we could do something similar.”⁶⁸ Observing their tactics, Mawu went over to a mass organising campaign as Fanaroff again observes,

At the beginning of the eighties we heard a rumour that Saawu was coming up to the Transvaal, so one day at Wilgespruit we decided we would out-organise Saawu using their tactics. So instead of using their tactic of mass rallies in the township and signing everyone up, we would move away from the factories where we always organised before, we’ll stay factory based, but we’ll now organise in the hostels. So Moss would tell workers he was coming to a Katlehong hostel and then organise everyone in that factory from the hostel. So Moss was one of the most powerful figures in the hostels - we really controlled the Vosloosrus hostels, Katlehong hostels, Daveyton, Wattville.⁶⁹

The Transvaal branch of Mawu began by holding general meetings in Kwesine Hotel, but unlike Saawu and Macwusa’s meetings, which were often attended by students and the unemployed, it

invited workers only. Eventually up to 9 000 workers were attending Mawu rallies on the East Rand.⁷⁰ In Durban, Mawu also decided to abandon its slow, factory by factory method of

organisation, and to move to mass organisation. Here however, the union changed its strategy for a different reason. As Erwin commented, “We never feared them [the new unions], they looked far too much like us in the seventies.”⁷¹

A further incentive to move to mass recruitment was the fear that when the government saw that the Wiehahn controls were not working, they would try and smash the unions as they had

attempted to do in the mid 1970s. Mawu therefore needed to build quickly to increase its power to fight back. In the Transvaal Mayekiso initially made contact with migrant workers in the Kwesine hostel as a means of organising a range of different plants. He recalls, “We used to meet the guys outside the compound and explain to them about the union. We did this for three days and then the security guards dismissed us off the property. After that we went into the compound secretly and signed up people. I would visit them in their rooms and managed to get 600 members in this way.”⁷² Thereafter it became a pattern that migrants mainly did not join the union individually, but in groups, recruited by fellow workers at work or by other workers, or organisers in the hostels.

Mawu’s new strategy was still rooted in the factories but now an emphasis was laid on organising large plants quickly. Organisers told workers that they could only raise demands with management when a majority of workers belonged to the union. This speeded up organisation, “We were going through factories of more than a thousand in a week.” Erwin recalls.⁷³ The union’s emphasis on building strong factory structures ensured that Mawu retained their membership - unlike the populist community unions, Saawu and Macwusa. As Mawu and Naawu grew, recruitment took on a life of its own, and organisers no longer had to engage in the slow careful recruitment work of the 1970s. Adler remembers,

In the seventies we were more externally based, because we didn’t have the internal organisation, people and contacts and we were fewer. So we would do a lot of work at the gates and off factory premises. In the eighties we were bigger and had more factories.

You couldn’t be at twenty factories on an afternoon to recruit, and the fear factor was less, and you had more organisation, and we’d get shopstewards to meet workers at home in the township, or pop along at lunchtime to the factory next door. That happened in Benoni industrial sites. It started to get a momentum of its own, that would occur at the level of disputes, you’d have someone to help so it started to be a lot more based in the factories.⁷⁴

In order to make use of the official bargaining mechanisms provided for in the Wiehahn laws, unions were required to register with the Department of Labour. Registration offered unions, like Mawu, a difficult choice. If they registered they had to accept government restrictions, but if they did not, they faced recognition problems and would lose their right to utilise the official bargaining institutions, the industrial councils, where white unions for so many years had successfully improved their members’ wages and conditions. Up to this point companies had remained

implacable in their refusal to acknowledge the emerging unions and frequently claimed that they could not recognise an unregistered union which had no standing in law. They persisted in promoting liaison and works committees even in the face of extensive opposition. By 1978 there were 2 600 liaison committees and over 300 works committees nationally.⁷⁵ It was this obduracy that was a major factor in Fosatu’s decision to apply for union registration.

At first all emerging union were united. They would not submit to government control and they would not register; especially as the government was proposing to exclude migrant workers from the ambit of the law and to bar racially mixed unions. Six months later only one African union had applied for registration. The first sign of a changing stand however came when Fosatu affiliate, Numarwosa, successfully polled membership (including UAW African members) on a

Numarwosa/UAW merger on the understanding that it would register if the minister gave it exemption to operate non-racially.⁷⁶ Thereafter Fosatu and its affiliates pressurised government by indicating that they would register provided all racial restrictions were removed. The government capitulated. This decision to permit non-racial registration broke the emerging unions’ united front.⁷⁷

A number of Cape unions continued vociferously to oppose registration. These included the African Food and Canning Workers Union, the Black Allied Workers Union, Saawu, Macwusa and most notably the Western Province General Workers Union (WPGWU). The WPGWU was influenced by Poulantzian theories concerning state power which were in currency at the time.

Poulantzas argued against Marxists who viewed the state simply as an instrument of the ruling class. He contended that the capitalist class was too focused on individual short term profit to be able to exercise all of state power in its own interests. The ruling class was not sufficiently broad in its vision to maintain the class’ power as a whole. Yet, although the state and capital operated relatively autonomously, the state provided sufficient stability in order for capitalism to reproduce itself. He further maintained, in Gramscian vein, that the state provided this stability through securing subordinate groups’ consent using the mechanism of cross class alliances. The ruling class, such as in the case of the New Deal in the United States, by making concessions to labour were able to cement an alliance between labour and particular fractions of capital thus buttressing the continued existence of capitalism.⁷⁸ Likewise, the WPGWU opposed registration on the grounds that “…registration spells the death knell of workers’ control of the unions…It involves…

a series of compromises on the question of workers’ control…having compromised on the question of workers’ control, the unions will have lost the most important element of their power.”⁷⁹ In order to maintain and strengthen democratic trade union practice it was necessary to maintain worker autonomy in the face of co-option by the state. Registration, WPGWU argued, would undermine workers’ control by putting decision-making in the hands of union officials thereby

forcing them to operate in a bureaucratic and undemocratic manner. Moreover, it contended that participation in Industrial Councils would weaken the independent unions’ bargaining strength because they were not sufficiently strong to outvote white minority unions. The `emerging unions`⁸⁰ power lay in strong workplace organisation where they had the capacity to strike and enforce agreements. In addition, it expressed concern about the powers of the Industrial Registrar who had the right to inspect unions to investigate allegations of unconstitutionality (in fact, as Fosatu pointed out, the Industrial Registrar could also investigate unregistered unions). For the Cape unions, Fosatu was too enmeshed in how registration would change employers’ attitudes whereas they believed only worker power could force recognition on employers.⁸¹ Unions did not require the government stamp of approval to use their power.

In turn, an article by Fine, de Clerq and Innes articulated the Fosatu position (although it was not officially endorsed by Fosatu). They argued that Fosatu’s position expressed a different conception of the state. Unlike the Cape unions who viewed the state as “capable of adapting its methods of repression towards the labour force, but never of easing repression…the new legislation implies a fatal subordination to new forms of repression, to the power of the state”⁸² they saw Fosatu as exposing “… the contradictions of state power” which was “as vital as the exposure of its repressiveness…the Wiehahn strategy … make it a high risk policy for the state.” Further the Wiehahn Commission had been forced upon the state “by years of struggle by workers and their representative organisations and therefore these changes establish a new terrain of activity to which black workers and their unions must relate…the state's denial of trade union recognition to black workers over the past fifty odd years has been one of the most serious obstacles to their development…it would seem … the height of folly for the unions to turn their backs on these concessions.” Fosatu believed that registration only weakened unions if they were not organised enough to resist control and that Numarwosa was registered and, as one of Fosatu’s strongest affiliates, had lost none of its militancy. For Fosatu the new laws were a site of struggle. As Erwin argued, “I always thought Wiehahn would give us new openings. Registration and the other controls could not tie us up if we were strong in the factories. They needed blunter instruments to do that, and because they said they were reforming, they couldn’t use them.”⁸³ Fosatu agreed with the anti-registration argument that unions could not accept racially separated unions but argued that unions should offer to register, but refuse to enter the system unless they could recruit all races. Mawu organiser Mbanjwa recalls, “The question of registration went together with the whole question of co-option. That is why we took racism as a key issue because that was at the heart of apartheid. And if they could register us as non-racial unions then we would have broken them down on the question of co-option.”⁸⁴

Fosatu, with Mawu its largest affiliate, and Numarwosa/UAW firmly behind the decision, saw

registration as an issue of tactics and not of principle and decided to join the system. It argued that registration made it more difficult for employers to refuse union recognition on the grounds they were not registered and this would increase workers’ bargaining power on the factory floor. Prior to 1977 the union had adopted a mixed strategy of demanding recognition whilst simultaneously taking up workplace grievances but lack of recognition often made grievance handling impossible.

The survival strategy adopted by Mawu in this hostile environment after the union’s collapse in 1976 involved therefore, a focus on building strong independent structures in a limited number of factories with the primary aim of winning recognition agreements which would entrench workers’

rights and operate as platforms for further advances. It was against this strategy that unions evaluated the issue of registration, “according to its ability to facilitate or obstruct these goals.”⁸⁵ The differences between the WPGWU and itself were fundamental. Fosatu believed these unions’

stand lacked confidence and that official bargaining rights were a victory which although holding dangers also opened up enormous possibilities.⁸⁶

Soon after Naawu’s decision to register, Mawu submitted an application and stressed its

commitment to non-racial organisation. The government’s response was to provide Mawu with a registration certificate to represent African workers alone. The union appealed to the Natal Supreme Court which upheld its right to non-racial registration and thus overturned decades of racial registration. ⁸⁷ The new law and the willingness of certain unions to register ironically helped the unregistered unions and rendered the differences between the two groups largely obsolete. Many employers who had previously used the argument that they could not deal with unregistered unions found themselves without a weapon and thus allowed unregistered unions to win factory rights. Furthermore the Volkswagen 1980 strike dramatically illustrated that

registration had not tamed emerging registered unions.⁸⁸

The Wiehahn laws and registration had the immediate effect of softening employers’ attitude and resulted in a marked rise in the number of formal recognition agreements won by Naawu and Mawu. In September 1980 Mawu signed its first recognition agreement with Precision Tools. This was followed by signed agreements with Tensile Rubber and Henred Freuhauf in 1981. By 1984 of Mawu’s 180 organised factories, 122 had signed recognition agreements. This was a considerable advance considering that employers often delayed recognition through the demand that unions attain a 50 +1 majority membership as the baseline for union recognition. Although an arduous task for unions the formula ironically forced them to conduct high powered recruitment campaigns which increased their numbers, democratic representivity and their power. By 1983 Naawu in the auto sector had organised 18 000 members and had won recognition in five out of nine auto companies with two further agreements imminent.⁸⁹ Of the 28 factories it had organised in auto, rubber and components it had won 27 recognition agreements by 1984.⁹⁰

Two broad categories of recognition agreement emerged. Those enshrining collective bargaining over wages and those that did not. Auto recognition agreements embodied an understanding by both parties that Numarwosa, and later Naawu, as registered unions would negotiate wages through the Eastern Cape regional industrial council as their history had lent them an

understanding of industry wide organisation together with `a sense of pragmatism and power not shared by the rest of the unions’.⁹¹ This power lay largely in the fact that by 1982 Naawu

represented a majority of auto workers in the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage area and could bargain from

represented a majority of auto workers in the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage area and could bargain from